Jennifer Egan at home in Brooklyn.
Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian

“No one ever wants to ask questions in New York, what is it with this place?” asked Jennifer Egan with a smile at the start of a Q&A at Barnes &Noble to celebrate this year’s collection of The Best American Short Stories.

But for the audience, the initial lack of questions may have been due to the overwhelming nature of the stories presented by authors Nell Freudenberger, Benjamin Nugent and Laura van den Berg. And this was the point. As Egan, the collection’s editor, commented: “I read in a childish way. I’m looking to be swept up without the wherewithal to ask if it’s good or bad.”

Egan, whose 2011 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad was awarded multiple prizes, including a Pulitzer, went on to describe the qualifications that determined a story’s inclusion: freshness and specificity of language, an unpredictable turn in the plot’s movement, and an awareness of layers. “I wanted to see if there was more to the story than was directly being told, and that there were multiple histories in the air without explanation.”

Each of the stories presented met Egan’s specifications. Nell Freudenberger, author of the novel Newlyweds and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, read Hover, which interlaces the domestic concerns of a newly divorced mother, answering her child’s questions about death, including, “How do dead people pee?” while trying to understand her sudden ability to levitate.

Benjamin Nugent, author of the novel Good Kids and American Nerd, a Cultural History, read his story God, about a fraternity member who finds himself captivated by a poem dedicated to his fraternity’s president. The story memorably opens: “We called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poems with her friends.”

Laura van den Berg, author of two short story collections What the World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, read her story Antarctica, considered by most critics to be the best, and most devastating, story of the collection. Having finished reading, in retrospect, it is difficult to summarise Antarctica with the haunting final line ringing in my head. Suffice to say, do not read it in public – or at least bring tissues.

Each story was not only related because each met Egan’s specifications, but because it shared a feeling of anxiety. Nugent explores anxiety over identity, how being a gay fraternity brother is acceptable in theory, but not in reality; the anxiety in Freudenberg’s story comes from the tension between the experience of motherhood and the new possibility of life, while being confronted with your child’s persistent questions about death.

However, Van den Berg’s Antarctica takes anxiety to a nearly other-wordly level – as she noted: “Antarctia is the closest you can get to outer space without going there.” The setting deepens the protagonist’s anxieties about those around her, leading the reader to ask the same question she does: does anyone truly know anyone?

For Van den Berg, the anxiety of our times propels her work. After the event, she noted: “We live in deeply anxious times. We can watch Isil videos while we drink our coffee.” And while her story did not make any such reference, the intersection of the ordinary, everyday acts of life and the catastrophic is deeply unnerving.

But there is another sort of anxiety that hovers above the collection. While it did not make a direct appearance in any of the stories presented, both Egan and series editor Heidi Pitlor noted it in the introduction and foreword: the rise of technology. Both ask the question: will people continue to read short stories and novels, now that virtually every alternative that exists can fit more easily into our pocket than a paperback?

There was similar anxiety expessed in the 1941 edition, when Mary Foley took the role of series editor in the midst of the second world war. She wrote: “Against the tragic backdrop of world events today a collection of short stories may appear very unimportant ... since American is defending today what is her own, the short story has a right to be considered as among the cultural institutions the country now is fighting to save.”

The question of persistence is different now. As Egan and series editor Heidi noted, this is the age of iPhones and Facebook and keeping up on your “friends” through the screen, rather than fictional characters who can often begin to feel like friends.

“Writing now is an act of faith,” Egan told me, when asked about this anxiety. “Anxiety about the future of reading is something we can’t think about when we write. It’s an existential feeling that can hinder us, so it’s better to forget and keep writing. It is this hope that the practice of writing, and reading, matters that should motivate us.”

I left the event with that hope; despite technology, despite the terrors of the world around us, there will always be stories to read and authors to write them.

This article was amended on 10 November 2014. An earlier version referred to the series editor as Helen, rather than Heidi Pitlor, at second mention.